Chapter I (2)

“Pretty painful scene that was!” I remarked when we had started in the taxi. “I shouldn’t think she’d stay with him.” “No,” said Rita, but assenting, it struck me, from some different point of view than mine. “She’s such a dear, isn’t she?” I went on. “Yes,” she said. “She’s so beautifully made, isn’t she?--her ankles and wrists.” I thought of Daisy under the guise of Bobby McIlvaine’s little blond Venus caught in the net with Mars. “What do you make of him?” I asked. “He’s pretty poisonous, isn’t he?” She looked up at me with a little appreciative smile, as if my saying that Coleman was poisonous had been an original deliberate joke, instead of a familiar cliché. Then, “He’s very jealous of her,” she said; and then: “Yes, he is _poisonous!_” Her way of agreeing that he was poisonous made it neither a cliché nor a joke, but something convinced and bitter. “All jealousy is poisonous: it poisons the woman as well as the man--it makes both of them suspicious of all that has ever been between them--and even when they want to be nice, they sound hateful to each other!” I remembered some novel of Wells in which the hero had overcome jealousy along with a number of other ignoble and anti-social emotions: I reflected that it was very foolish and very base to be jealous. However: “I suppose,” I said, “that working for the _Telegram-Dispatch_ makes him hate himself, and so makes him awfully irritable. How can people who are really sensitive and intelligent--as I have no doubt he is--but who are obliged to spend all their working hours feeding the public libels and lies--how can they possibly be amiable at home?” “Yes,” she said, “such lies they print!--such cowardly lies! And even if the facts are true, they cheapen the emotions behind them--and to cheapen human passion, human suffering, is to lie! Like poor Lina Lemberg’s letters.” (Lina Lemberg was a young Polish girl, who had recently murdered her husband, and been much on the front page.) “They may have been illiterate and clumsy, but they meant something real.--To tear people’s hearts to pieces for all the grinning crowd to see--and pick up a bit of it and finger it, and perhaps wish they had one, too, and hate the people who have--and then throw it back in the gutter again!” Her passion had not ceased to surprise me. She still seemed a little theatrical, but I had never heard a woman speak so eloquently. “Yes: that’s just what happens,” I said--it was all that I could say: I felt that I could never express myself so well nor feel what I said so intensely.

I lived in Bank Street then, and the taxi had stopped at my door. Rita waited for me on the sidewalk while I was paying the driver: her little face seemed narrow and thin--almost nunlike.

When we had climbed to my apartment, and I had turned on the light, I was ashamed of the prospect disclosed. There were a large and comfortable couch, sets of books in glass-doored bookcases, Whistler’s “Battersea Bridge,” and a drawing by Leonardo, which I had brought up with me from college, a small mahogany desk, a green carpet and a French clock. Besides, the maid had been there that morning and everything was swept and neat. I was afraid that she would see at once--if she had not already guessed--that I was really not one of them, that I had never paid their price. The luxurious couch seemed vulgar; the sets in the bookcases pedantic; the pictures unbearably banal; and the little mahogany desk appropriate kindling-wood for the social revolution. I attempted to call attention to the only feature of the place which might be considered Bohemian and raffish: “That’s not the right time,” I pointed out. “That clock hasn’t gone for years!”

“Oh, isn’t this nice!” she exclaimed, looking quickly and interestedly about her. There was a little alcove off the sitting-room which I used as a study, and she stood looking into it, as if entranced. “Do you work in there?” she exclaimed. “What a _wonderful_ place to work!” She came back and sat down on the couch: “Oh, it’s so _nice_ here!--so _nice!_” she smiled in an ecstatic childlike way.

I felt, at any rate, that she meant it, and that I possessed an unexpected advantage. None the less, I was a little diffident about producing a bottle of peach brandy, as I had seen her drinking whiskey straight at the Colemans’ party: I brought out both liqueur and Scotch, and deprecatingly remarked that I didn’t suppose she’d care for the former. “I’d love some!” she said.--“What a lovely label! It looks like lace, doesn’t it?--like lace made out of wire!”

“You know,” she went on, “I have no place of my own to work in now--and I miss it so! I’m living with my mother and sister, and the apartment is so small! I have to write with the sewing-machine going in the next room.” “Oh, what a pity!” I said, “I should think it would drive you crazy. I know how nervous it makes you to have something going on to a different kind of rhythm from the one you’re writing to!” “Do you write?” she asked. “I try to write poetry--but I’m not any good.” “I’d like to hear your poems,” she said, looking up with an intent gaze which seemed to pierce the politeness of her remark. “No,” I replied. “After hearing yours to-night, I wouldn’t have the nerve to show you mine.--I don’t suppose you’d recite again the ones that you recited at the party.” “I’m so glad that you liked them,” she said, again with that incongruous intensity which gave sincerity and significance to even her formulas of courtesy. “I just wrote them, and I like them myself,” she smiled with her funny grin, which left her as serious and as strangely pressing as before. She sat back against the couch, dropped her cigarette to her lap and recited the poems again--more beautifully, it seemed to me, than the first time: her voice, in the silent room, sounded lonely, and I was stirred and awed to be alone with this living voice of poetry.

All to me was a wonder then--her old dress, her mother’s sewing-machine, her wide gamine’s grin, her formidable dignity and her feverish preoccupation with some unexplained disturbing reality which I was coming more and more to feel underlay everything she did. It was, I came to see, as she recited, the same thing--a kind of moral agony, unremitting and exalted--which made it possible for her, in her poetry, to deal with commonplace ideas--as she worked often with the tritest figures, the old debased currency of verse, which poets had then begun to pride themselves on ceasing to try to pass--making them carry whatever passion and whatever strangeness she chose.

Her cheeks were fiery now--all her face was suffused with fierce pink, and I saw that there was red in her hair. I saw now for the first time that she was beautiful. Her brow was very high and wide, and the resonant voice with which she recited--so different from her quick dry speech, a mere pizzicato of those strings--seemed the full-toned and proper music of what I saw now also for the first time was a long and lovely throat of a solidity and complexity of symmetry, like some harmoniously swollen musical instrument, almost incongruous with her tiny body--and through which now the lonely beach, beyond the meagre moment of fire, and the futile devotion of the mother to the blemished and dim-witted child, sounded the chords of some mode of feeling more profound than our human sadness, some ground-tone where human emotion becomes merely the process of life, of life in its labor through the universe. I knew, what I had never really felt in my intercourse with friends who had written, that literature could be reality--as natural as conversation, yet as deep as life itself.

For I have not, in speaking of these poems, in any adequate way described them: they were poems about love, and in them what was true of love was true not of love only. And even now, in this part of what I write, which deals with feelings and thoughts most remote from me, least real to the mind that writes--at the memory of that music, I halt and lose my way.

In another poem, which I had never seen, and which she had also recently written, she had some image of a swift up-country river lacerated by rapids, where a smooth and lovely flock of stones forever tumbled and crashed into splinters the black-silver mirror of its deeps, dismissing it, fiercer at first, then thin, querulous and shredded, divided in the threads of feebler streams that drip at last over slimy mossy banks among the last orange drops of the jewel-weed, and lose themselves in the fields. I have turned it all into ordinary literature, over-animating the water, describing the jewel-weed too exactly (it is I who supply the drops: she had only named the flower). I have used too many adjectives: she had only the barest verbs and nouns; but she woke through them the resonant ache of the throaty sound of the river, so noble in its dwindled fall. And I, knowing enough of literature to enjoy the consummate art, but not yet enough of life, to assent with my heart to the terror, the terror mastered by the mind, and clutched and wrenched into beauty, which I could only half divine, but which troubled me and made me solemn, could only tell her how wonderful I thought it, as if it had been merely a dress she had been wearing or a garden she had grown. And I sounded even sillier and lamer when I added: “I’ve seen those up-state rivers: I know exactly what you mean!” “Yes, I knew you did,” she replied, “when you said that something I said this evening sounded like a New York State river. I come from up there, you know, and I’ve been getting homesick lately. That was why I was talking about rivers--and why I wrote that poem.”

I was silent, and she looked beyond the lamp, through the little dark study, to where the moon seemed imbedded in the pane like a flaw of pearl in dark blue glass. “How lovely the moon is!” she exclaimed in her nervous, alert way. I looked out and answered: “Yes: it looks like a bubble in the glass.” She noted the accuracy of this, checking it up: “Yes, it does exactly!”--so emphatically that I felt pleased at having said something clever. We stared at the moon without speaking--I thinking, a little dazedly, of the perfect felicity of the moment, full of brightness and freedom and peace--of the beauty of stony rivers, of the pearly moon in the pane, of intoxicating coldness and poetry--of stones, of lovely globes of a lunar fluidity of yolks, lodged unbroken below the translucence of a limpid vitreous stream.

Then I recalled my wandering senses and suggested another drink. “Oh, if I have another drink, I’ll be drunk!” she said, screwing herself down in her corner and with a sudden rictus of her grin which transmogrified her grossly in a strange tense glee.

But I could talk to her only of poetry--of those terrific images of the commonplace by which the greatest poets can move us and which her own poems had brought to my mind--the Roman street-corners of Catullus, the prison-window of Verlaine, the race for the green flag at Verona which Dante remembers in Hell. She had read extraordinarily widely for a woman, and she talked about the poets as only a master can talk of the masters of his craft and with the fierceness with which only a woman, when woman’s narrow concentration has been displaced from its ordinary objects, can concern itself with art--isolating in familiar poems phrases I had never thought of: some armor-joint of a preposition which rang with a solid sound or some unobtrusive adjective which troubled the whole line.

It was cold: she put on her cloak and I wrapped her legs in a blanket--but still we talked, and drank the peach brandy sip by sip. At last, as I was gazing toward the window, I became aware of an indigo deepness which deeply delighted me, like some full and triumphant staining of emotion and thought. It was the blue of dawning June, through which presently, as brooding I watched it, green and red began darkly to deepen. The blue brightened and now was translucent, now limpid, now dissolved. And, still talking of poetry, still quoting, still eager and glowing with the images of that life of literature which rejects or suppresses nothing that goes to make our common life, but where all is passionate, noble and rich, I saw, as it were with incredulity, that the brightening green and red were the rain-revived trees and brick walls of my own backyards in Bank Street. Now even the poor soiled yellows of the downtown tenement houses, the leaves of the flaccid ailanthus swaying their fingery clusters in the stir of morning air, through that first distinct light of day were seen washed with libations of light--till it seemed to me that I had waked--or rather that, without sleeping, I had passed--to the happier, more living hues of a different world. And I knew, and knew with amazement, that we had talked the night through, and only sunk deeper in spring.

“Good gracious! it’s morning!” she cried.--“Oh, no: it’s not so late,” I assured her. “The nights are getting shorter.” She laughed and put out a cigarette. “I must go home!” she said, springing up.

We found a taxi in Greenwich Avenue. She gave the directions to the driver in her precise and compelling fashion. I invited her, in the taxi, to come with me to see McIlvaine’s ballet. “I’d love to!” she replied. We made an engagement for Tuesday (it was Sunday morning). Then, with hesitation, I explained that I was never at home in the daytime, and that if she needed a place to work, I should be glad to have her use my apartment. She demurred, but I thought not unpersuadably.

I left her at an incredible address beyond the Ninth Avenue Elevated--on Twelfth Street, almost at the docks--one of two or three red-brick houses among warehouses and sordid saloons. We parted, she quite tired and pale, but with a queer tense final vibration even as I left her in the doorway, just before, quickly closing the door, she seemed to disappear in a flash.

It was day. I walked home through a little open square--Abingdon Square, I saw with surprise: I had never heard of it before, though it lay almost around the corner from where I lived. I gazed vaguely at a statue of a man in a little triangular park and wondered who it was--some legislator or some patriot, perhaps--some patriot in the old style, like Garibaldi in Washington Square--some great man I had never heard of in that region I had never discovered. Farther on, I became aware of a kind of monumental stone pergola--it seemed to me then to be in marble--which I didn’t understand--and which in my weariness, my happy weariness, I didn’t try to. Some downtown equivalent of Grant’s Tomb--but who was buried in it? It was almost like a temple. I was still moving in that strange daytime world into which, by staying up all night, I seemed to have been translated. Now the Village was at last revealed to me; it had that day come alive about me, and I felt myself part of its life. I, like them, had turned my back on all that world of mediocre aims and prosaic compromises; and at that price--what brave spirit would not pay it?--I had been set free to follow poetry!

In Bank Street, as I passed a presser’s shop, it occurred to me that it would be, after all, a difficulty about the story which I had had the idea of writing when I had heard about Ray Coleman’s thief, that the presser’s boy would probably have escaped as soon as the wife opened the door.

When I came back to my rooms again, they seemed no longer, through the drowsy eyes of day, my own familiar husk: there was the couch where she had sat--there was the ash-tray full of ashes--there were the glasses from which we had drunk. I poured out the last sweet dregs of peach brandy.

It was Sunday--I did not have to work. I dumped the Sunday paper on the couch. I pulled down the shades in my bedroom--the sun made them glow dull orange. I pulled Dante out and read the lines about the green flag at Verona--and the scene with Beatrice that began, “_Dante, perchè Virgilio se ne vada--grieve not, thou needst must grieve for another wound!_”--but scarcely paying attention to the words, I pushed the book back to the table and turned over on my cheek. Something or other I had come for, I had found.

* * * * *

It was characteristic of Hugo Bamman--with whom I had gone to prep school (though we had afterwards gone to different colleges), and whose point of view, up to the night I met Rita, had, as I say, so much influenced my own--that, at the height of a convivial evening, he should take a sudden and determined departure. Even at parties in Greenwich Village, with which he was in principle more nearly sympathetic than with parties anywhere else, he would carefully isolate his hat or hang it up in some specially conspicuous place. He was never sure, even in the Village, when he might not feel that it was urgently needed, as had been the case on the evening I have described, after his argument with Ray Coleman. And when he once had his hat in his hands, it was impossible to keep him. It was at the same time as if he had suddenly become frightened, and as if he were under some obligation of reporting for duty elsewhere.

And it was true that he did become frightened, and that he was, in a certain sense, at the orders of a higher obligation. Hugo’s father had been a well-to-do lawyer of a Philadelphia Quaker family; his mother, a Bostonian. The elder Bamman, after serving with distinction through three administrations at Washington as Solicitor General, had been dislodged by the advent of the Democrats; and had thereupon retired from public life and occupied himself with writing books. He knew Shakespeare and Milton by heart and was given to quoting them in conversation, and he already had a reputation for unconventional political views; but nobody had been quite prepared for the opinions which he now made public. His first book, which was called _Representative Government, and the Way and the Light_, began with an extremely realistic, and even cynical, discussion of American public life and ended, with quotations from Isaiah, on an unexpected note of religious clairvoyance.

It was said sometimes that Mr. Bamman had been embittered by his enforced retirement; sometimes, that he was insane. It was not that he had prophesied good of the Democrats: on the contrary, he had predicted the worst; but he had appeared also to repudiate the Republicans. He had asserted that, between the two parties, there was not a pin to choose--that both were lost in corruption and error; and, what was worse, that one could hope for nothing better from the society which accepted their leadership and from the religion which allowed them to survive. The book excited a certain amount of interest, was made the subject of editorials; then was completely forgotten by everybody. If I had not happened to know Hugo, I should never have looked it up and read it. Thereafter--his wife having died and his sons gone away to school--Mr. Bamman left Washington altogether and secluded himself on a lonely island in an Adirondack lake, where he lived on fish and game, cooked all his own meals and struck off another book even more realistically pungent and even more apocalyptic than the first. He had vowed to stay the winter out in his cabin, but in February he caught a bad cold which developed into pneumonia, and, despite his protests, he had to be removed to a town where he could have medical attention. His sons were telegraphed at their school; and Hugo, blinking at his sudden release from the agonizing life of prep school, where the boys made fun of his ebullient stuttering, his inability to pronounce _r_, his stiff intractable black hair, and his clothes, which were bought for him by an aunt and which always looked too young for him, lifted his goggles from the frozen ground and gazed about him with singular relief at the ice-ponds and white houses of the North; read nervously half a chapter of Meredith; and, at last, heard his father, dying, mingle texts from Isaiah and Ezekiel with anxious queries about the pump at his camp, which he seemed to fear was irremediably frozen, and with the names of his sisters and his wife.

Hugo Bamman, after his father’s death, had spent his vacations with the aunt in Philadelphia who had selected his neckties and suits, and he had rebelled against her so violently, that he soon found himself under suspicion of having inherited his father’s “queerness.” But the more the aunt, who was an admirable person and felt her responsibility acutely, tried to inculcate sound principles in Hugo, the more resentfully did he shy away from them. Save for an occasional peevish outbreak, however, he remained generally docile; and his own docility increased his resentment. While he was still at school and college, his heresies were mostly confined to matters of literature and of minor social convention. But during the third year of the War, though he was to graduate the following spring, he suddenly left college and enlisted in the American Ambulance. In spite of his Quaker tradition, he was at that time full of romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies, and had composed, for the college magazine, an eloquent editorial which began with Joan of Arc and ended with Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. When America joined the Allies, he went over to an American medical unit. Hugo served throughout the War; but he came out with different emotions from those which had carried him in. He never told me much about his adventures, and never indeed, at this time, talked much about himself, so that my account of his experience in the Army is derived largely from the well-known novel which he afterward wrote on the subject and which seemed such a striking contrast to the rather precious and exotic little poems, reminiscent of the eighteen-nineties, which he had published in the college magazine.

From Hugo’s novel, then, it would appear that during the first months of his ambulance-driving, he was still sustained by his romantic faith and preoccupied with proving to himself his own capacity for endurance and courage. He tells us of the hero of his novel, that though most of the wounded men he had been carrying turned out to have died on the way, he had never felt so happy in his life as after successfully bringing his ambulance through the craters and geysers of a bombardment. At that time, after his first physical sinkings of nausea and fear, he had been able to line up corpses on the floor of the field hospital with less emotion than he had once arranged books on the shelves of his bookcases at college, and had incinerated amputated legs with less of real regret than he had once burnt discarded manuscripts.

But after America had entered the War, Hugo enlisted in the American army and found himself posted, with the rank of sergeant, during the dull and disheartened winter of 1917, at an American base hospital in the Vosges, some distance behind the lines. One afternoon, he had gone for a walk in the hills, and come out finally in the public square of a tiny mountain village. A circle of people were standing about the body of a wild sow which had been killed by a hunter and which, bristled like the piny ridges of her northern forests and with her jaws asnarl in death, lay flat, her belly ripped open and her little ones, brightly striped and in a day or two to have been farrowed, stretched out limp beside her on the ground, while the hunter bargained over the carcasses and the dogs sniffed at the blood. A deep tenderness and sadness overwhelmed him for the little wild pigs; and he watched with horror the nonchalance of the hunter: he began to rage within himself against the violators of life. Then he was chilled with self-contempt. He took refuge in a little café and fortified himself with brandy. Then he went back to the base hospital.

There was a major of the medical corps who kicked and cuffed his patients, and who was in the habit of amusing himself, on his evening rounds of the wards, by tearing the zinc-oxide bandages off the raw and running wounds of the gas cases. Hugo complained of this major to the commanding officer of the unit: he had always feared his superiors more than any amount of shell-fire.

Soon thereafter, returning in the morning, just before reveille, from the local château, where he often went to dinner and sometimes, by private understanding with the other sergeants and the guards, was able to spend the night, he was, to his surprise, picked up by the Military Police, put under arrest, court-martialled and convicted, and sent off under guard to a prison-camp. As a sergeant he had been lax with his men; and, at the court-martial, he was accused of having abetted all their misdeeds: of these misdeeds he had never even known, but when he tried to explain this to the court-martial, the effect was equally unhappy.

On his arrival in the prison-camp, all his belongings, including private letters, his money and his watch, were taken from him. He saw the photograph of another man’s sweetheart torn up before his face. The first morning, when he was led out in lockstep with the other prisoners, the ranks fell into disorder, and the sergeants set upon the men and clubbed them with what were known as “dizzy-sticks,” while the officers looked on. This was repeated every morning, and Hugo learned that the confusion in the ranks was brought about by the sergeants themselves: the sergeant at the head of the line would order the prisoners to hurry up while the sergeant at the end would order them to slow down. Hugo was struck in the mouth one day and two of his teeth knocked out (he had the scar across his lips all his life). After this ceremony, which the sergeants called “morning exercise,” the prisoners were drilled before machine-guns.

The food was scant bread and thin soup; and on the third day of Hugo’s imprisonment, two colored boys got into the kitchen and tried to steal something to eat. One of the boys was caught, blackjacked, beaten and dragged bleeding to solitary confinement. When he had sufficiently recovered, an attempt was made, by order of the officer in command, to induce him to reveal the name of his accomplice: the boy was chained for four hours to a wall, while the sergeants threatened and cursed him, beat him on the soles of his feet and singed off most of his hair. In the meantime, however, the accomplice had cut his own throat with a razor-blade. Two days afterwards, a big Texan, who had tried to strike one of the guards when the latter had assailed him with a blackjack, was shot down, in the presence of the men, by the commanding officer. At the end of three weeks, however, Hugo was finally released through the intervention of his elder brother, who was already a major in the Adjutant-General’s department and to whom Hugo had managed to send a letter before he had left his unit.

Hugo’s further participation in the War was of rather a half-hearted character. Now, it was no longer the Germans who were the enemy, but the governing classes of the world.

By the time he had been discharged from the service, he had become a social revolutionist; and his reaction against the complacent and conventional, the capitalistic, world from which he came, reached lengths almost grotesque. He hated this world because he feared it, and he feared it because he knew how much of it there was still left in himself. He was haunted by veritable hobgoblins which wore the aspect of doubles of himself. A visit to any of the members of his family was enough to throw him into a panic. He would afterwards describe it in terms which would almost have been excessive on the part of one resuscitated from drowning. “On a Sunday afternoon in Washington,” he would gasp, “you go out into the stweet--and you see all those little bwick houses--and the weather is suffocating--and you look at the people on the stweet and they don’t seem to be going anywhere--and you think that, if you stayed there long yourself, you’d probably get like that, too--and yet you haven’t got the mowal stwength to leave!” Or, “I was staying with a cousin of mine at Cambwidge--my cousin is being gwoomed for some big job at Harvard, and it weduced me to such a state of depwession!--Did you ever know any of these young men who are being gwoomed for big jobs?--Well, first their hair falls out--then they have to buy glasses--then they have to appear at certain times and places wearing a silk hat--then their teeth go and they get false teeth--false teeth are almost as important as a silk hat, and it isn’t everybody who can make his teeth drop out just by auto-suggestion--if they can do that, they’ve got the stuff!--I’d said I was coming back to Cambwidge, one night after I’d gone in to have dinner in Boston, but I couldn’t face it!--I couldn’t get a berth at the station, so I sat up all night in the day-coach!” (This sort of thing was possible for Hugo, because he purposely never travelled with a suit-case, but only with an old musette-bag, which he had brought back from France.) Yet I have heard him, when Boston was disparaged, unexpectedly come to its defense with a eulogy of Thoreau and Garrison.

Whenever he introduced into his novels representatives of the “cultivated” class to which he himself belonged, he would never allow them to figure save in hideous caricature--the result of his having discerned, seized upon and isolated in them, those ignoble middle-class qualities which they shared with the families of the _nouveaux riches_ manufacturers and railroad magnates whom they ridiculed. And, on these occasions of visiting his relatives, by the very force of his fixed intense belief in their incurable perversity and prejudice, he had a faculty for trapping them into absurdities which did not at all represent their real views. These Hugo would make careful note of, as he returned to New York on the train, leaving the cousins and uncles a little blank. His aunt in Philadelphia, for example, with whom Hugo had spent so much of his boyhood, had been, by reason of her Quaker tradition, strongly disposed to admire his war book, though she was offended by the bad language of the characters: it always appeared, however, when she attempted to talk to him about it, that, in deploring this particular feature, she was damning the whole book.

Hugo’s elder brother, especially, though, unlike the other members of the family, he did himself profess progressive views, affected Hugo in a fatal way. This elder brother had studied for the ministry, but had found himself unable to accept the doctrines of the Episcopal Church save in a highly rationalized form: as a consequence, he had gone in for sociology, and, after the War, had become a professor of sociology in a small New England college. When Hugo went to visit his brother, the latter would remonstrate with him severely and unremittingly. He would, for example, point out to Hugo the serious impropriety of the latter’s having published certain scurrilous verses in a radical magazine. He would argue along lines of social responsibility: the real purport of the objectionable metaphors would be understood by very few readers, whereas the rest would see only obscenity and unpatriotic sentiments; this would hurt Hugo’s reputation and weaken his influence as a publicist, etc., etc. Such discussions infuriated Hugo all the more because his brother always went on the assumption that he recognized the same evils with which Hugo was so passionately preoccupied and that he had it as much at heart to discover the proper way of remedying them: Hugo’s brother’s social ideas and Hugo’s, when stated in a certain way by the former, appeared indistinguishable. These visits were further embarrassed by the apprehensions of Hugo’s sister-in-law: she seemed always on edge for fear Hugo, whose manners were excellent, might advance, in the presence of the Dean’s or the President’s wife, with whom she was closely allied, some subversive opinion.

Another bugaboo which pursued Hugo--another monster which he lived in terror of allowing to swallow him up--was the college dilettante--that is to say, the superior undergraduate who takes tea with the snobbish Latin professor, plays Debussy at the club after the girls from the house-party have left, and goes about with a small group of friends who gossip over the politics of the dramatic club and giggle over the mustache of the brunette who waits on the counter at the pastry shop where they buy cinnamon buns. These friends, like Hugo himself, had been affected by their experience in the War: but, in their case, it had had usually the effect of leaving them merely demoralized and dispirited, writing fragmentary learned poetry, full of gall and resignation, in imitation of T. S. Eliot. These friends used to make fun of Hugo for the obstinate persistence with which--inordinately fastidious and shy--he had trained himself to speak in public (overcoming his tendency to stutter, though not his inability to pronounce _r_), and had even attained a certain reputation as an orator at strikers’ meetings and demonstrations for civil liberty. Hugo’s friends, as a rule, disparaged the admirable literary gifts--the logic, the solid imagination and the feeling for pungent language--which were disguised by the deliberate plainness and the colloquial carelessness of Hugo’s novels, pamphlets and appeals.

And Hugo himself would have been the last person to call their attention to his merits. Since the War, the discussion of literature had affected him like his memories of college, and the spectre of the modern literary man, whom he had encountered at New York parties and in Paris cafés, came to accompany, and to merge with, the spectre of the æsthetic undergraduate. Though he had in his youth been full of literary enthusiasms, he now habitually treated the great writers--including those whom he most admired, from Plato to James Joyce--in a manner cavalier almost to the point of hysteria. It was partly, I suppose, that Hugo had never forgotten young country boys from Arkansas and Georgia who could neither read nor write, bewilderedly drafted into the army and pitted against young Germans who had studied Goethe in the gymnasia--the accumulated masterpieces of literature having apparently not in any way affected the fates of either. But it was also that he continually tended, by some natural gravitation which enraged him, to find himself comfortably at home among the sallow-faced reviewers and the review-writing poets and novelists who relieved the mediocrity of their days by the gin-drinking and ribaldry of their evenings. At these gatherings, they were able to convince themselves that they were not merely dreary book-worms and hacks, but men of taste and wit, citizens of the world; and it was partly this anti-academic pose which made Hugo--himself violently anti-academic--eager at first to attend their parties. But he soon divined the pit of ashes at the bottom of the gin-bottle, and shied off as he had done from his family and from the companions of his college days; and literary society was soon added to his index of phobias.

When Hugo put himself into a novel, it was always in caricature--as the little Johnny Boston-Beans of the comic papers of his youth, or as some incredibly fatuous and inept young college intellectual who died of tuberculosis or fell into a subway construction. I have seen him shudder at the sight of a handful of volumes of Max Beerbohm, whom he had himself enjoyed reading at college, which I was unpacking in a new apartment; and I have rarely heard him use bad language (though he admired it on the part of others) save when the name of Henry James was mentioned. This continual shying away made Hugo a little difficult, since he was constantly objecting, not merely to what you had said, but to what he thought you were going to say. Thus, if you remarked to him of W. Z. Foster that Foster had the barren rigid strength of a piston in a steel-mill, he would interrupt you with, “Well, I’d rather see an effective and hard-hitting machine like Foster than a jerry-built ornamental bank-building in a phony classical style, like Harding!”--and so plunge into a spirited tirade against the industrial system, which you vainly tried to avert with explanations that you did not admire Harding, that you did admire Foster, etc. Or if you were going out to dinner with him and complained that the sentimental Yiddish soloist at Zincovitz’s restaurant was beginning to get on your nerves, he would be off with, “Well, I can’t stand those little tea-rooms where they have copies of _Town and Country_ lying around!”--little tea-rooms of whose existence you had never even known.

He was rather afraid of women, and seemed never to fall in love. I suppose he regarded women as the most dangerous representatives of those forces of conservatism and inertia against which his whole life was a protest: but I am convinced that he cherished, in his heart, the most romantic expectations. I believe that he was always hoping for some straight, dark, spare, realistic girl revolutionist, who would be to him a comrade and a partner; but that in fact, he was invariably alienated from the types of emancipated women whom he encountered in the Village, by an unconfessed but ineradicable instinct which rejected them as not being ladies. He would, of course, shy away from this instinct and overwhelm them with politeness, with sympathy, with determined good-fellowship; but this effusion masked a retreat. I think he was affected, in this connection, by the same peculiar and incurable isolation which had made him seem to himself, during the War, almost indifferent to the sufferings of the soldiers till he found himself brimming with tears at the sight of a slaughtered sow. So he would flee from even parties in the Village, when an appropriate situation arose for playing a rôle in some woman’s life, and go home to write with passion, almost with amorous feeling, of some girl bandit who had been harshly sentenced and brutally denounced by a stupid judge--of whom he had read in his evening paper.

For Hugo was really on close terms with no one. As soon as he had sampled the conversation and caught the social flavor of a household or a group, he would simply go straight away and bottle a specimen for his books, where he would assign it to its proper place in the economic structure. He distrusted his family and his early associates, because he believed that they had sold their souls to capitalist institutions; but though he chose to live exclusively with outlaws, in whom he was always discovering qualities heroic and picturesque to the point of allegory, he never managed really to be one of them and perhaps never trusted them, either. So tough remained the insulation between himself and the rest of humanity--the insulation of his Puritan temperament and his genteel American breeding, reinforced by his artist’s detachment and his special situation. Hugo once told me of an illiterate Arkansas boy, lying wounded in a field hospital, who, thinking Hugo a superior person, had been unwilling to ask him to write a letter, and who had finally had to beg the favor of another wounded man nearly as helpless as himself.

And so he walked among us like a human penance for the shortcomings of a whole class and culture--of the society which, in America, had paralyzed in his friends and himself half the normal responses to life; which had sterilized its women with refinement; which had lived on industrial investments and washed its hands of the corruption of politics; which had outlawed its men of genius or intimidated them with taboos; which so strangely had driven his father to his Adirondack lake and, on the rare and brief occasions when he returned for a wedding or a funeral, had seemed to Hugo’s eyes to sadden him, as, to the latter’s heartiness and wit, the other members of the family had returned only so much that was energetically arid, so much that was self-confidently timid and so much that was cheerfully cold; and which had desolated Hugo’s own soul, when, through empty afternoons of boyhood, he had wondered why he seemed so impotent to break the spell of his tutoring in the morning, his aunt’s nap after lunch, the people for tea in the afternoon and his late luxurious reading in bed, to work on a paper, to ship on a whaler or to live on a ranch in the West; and which had finally inflicted on him the shame of that day when he had found the crippled Arkansan dictating his letter to his wife to a man half-flayed with mustard-gas--the shame of knowing that a fellow sufferer and one who had suffered more than he, had been afraid to ask him to render what was perhaps the only service for which his education had fitted him.

I have said, a whole class and culture; but Hugo had one other memory of his father, which was afterwards, he told me once, to take on for him a special significance. They had been lunching at the New York club of the university from which his father had graduated and to which Hugo was soon to go, and the elder Bamman had commented during lunch with humorous disapproval and with imperturbable surprise on the inferior quality of the men whom he observed in the dining-room about him: on their way out, as Mr. Bamman was getting into his coat, he had been violently jostled by a young man in a blue suit and bone-rimmed spectacles, who was in a great hurry, but who hurriedly apologized. Mr. Bamman was broad-shouldered and well set-up, and he still wore a fine Olympian beard and one of those flat-crowned derbies which were fashionable in the eighties (he remained something of a dandy even after he had become a recluse); but, at the moment of the impact, as Mr. Bamman looked dazedly around, Hugo had caught on his father’s face the shadow of feebleness and pain. And he had realized then for the first time that his father had no longer the prestige of an acknowledged leader of the community, nor even of a distinguished person: he was a figure of isolation, bewilderment and fatigue.

In the America where Hugo came to manhood, there was, in a sense, only a single class and a single culture; one found it behind every façade, one felt it through every uniform--and not merely among those members of society whom it had already become fashionable to ridicule: the small business man, the hired reformer, the windbag politician--but in the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served; in the grandeur of the medical specialist’s waiting-room and the impoverishment of science which it masked; in the educated clergyman turned evangelist and vying with the mountebanks of Methodism; alike in the silk hat of the labor leader and in the homely and hollow plain-spokenness of the self-made industrial master; and even in the universities, with their presidents held in subjection by millionaire trustees, with their middle-class timidity about raising, in class or conversation, the real political, moral or æsthetic problems of the time; even in the best of the theatre, where incompetence and indifference almost invariably betrayed the beauty of the noblest text; even in literature, where an ignorant criticism was ready to declare every apprentice a master; in that whole machine of interrelated interests, which kept literature, theatre, learning, church, medicine, politics and law, all fixed in their mediocre functions, all constrained by the fear of their neighbors, all intent on their bank accounts--all that appalling susceptibility to regimentation by “business” and that incapacity for discipline of self, all that voracity for physical comfort, all that pervading commonness of mind, which, even in those sections of society from which Hugo’s father had come and which had at least produced a few men like him, now debased their distinction to luxury and made cowards of their leaders. It was, perhaps, after all, hardly necessary to find special explanations for Hugo’s fear of committing himself, of giving hostages to any group--which moved beside him like Pascal’s abyss. It was, perhaps, after all, not unnatural that there should come a moment, in every company, when Hugo would want to snatch his hat, to say good-by and get away.